One of the factors that Google (and other search engines) use in determining the appropriate keywords that your site should rank for is something called latent semantic indexing. It’s a fancy phrase which sort of means that there are phrases that are synonyms for one another – they mean the same thing – or are from related topic. Google wants to make sure that when you’re talking about a cell that it understands the difference between the ones in your body and the ones you use to talk on the phone with. Google is indexing your content and determining what phrases are related to one another.
For example, if you have a page discussing search engine optimization, you are going to use phrases on this page like:
- search engine optimization
- search engine ranking
- keyword density
- keywords
- search engine marketing
- search results
- optimizing your content
- …and so on
The phrases used on a page will affect the page’s ranking within Google for keyphrases you are targeting. But how do you determine what phrases Google thinks are related to the ones you’re targeting? Fortunately, Google has a somewhat “hidden” utility to help users find related content which will give you some insight into related terms and the phrases you should be using in your content. Here’s a link to see the Wonder Wheel for the term latent semantic indexing.
This provides a map of related terms which you can click on to discover more phrases in the Wonder Wheel. On the left hand side, click on Related Searches and you will see a list of related keywords:
Using these two tools, you can generate a number of keywords to use in your content. These phrases will help you target a specific phrase and get your site ranked high for your specific target term.
